Definition
Information Retrieval (IR) in RAG pipelines is the mechanism for selecting the most relevant document segments from a knowledge base to ground an LLM’s response. It balances the architectural trade-off between retrieval latency and contextual precision, often involving a trade-off between dense (semantic) and sparse (keyword) search strategies.
Not general web search, but the specific 'Retrieve' step in the Retrieve-Read-Generate loop of a RAG system.
"A research assistant scanning a library for the three most relevant books to lay open on a writer's desk before they start a draft."
- Vector Embeddings(Prerequisite)
- Top-K Retrieval(Component)
- Semantic Search(Component)
- Reciprocal Rank Fusion(Component)
Conceptual Overview
Information Retrieval (IR) in RAG pipelines is the mechanism for selecting the most relevant document segments from a knowledge base to ground an LLM’s response. It balances the architectural trade-off between retrieval latency and contextual precision, often involving a trade-off between dense (semantic) and sparse (keyword) search strategies.
Disambiguation
Not general web search, but the specific 'Retrieve' step in the Retrieve-Read-Generate loop of a RAG system.
Visual Analog
A research assistant scanning a library for the three most relevant books to lay open on a writer's desk before they start a draft.